Media content delivery systems often provide a combination of basic and premium services. Basic services may include a standard package of television channels while premium services may include Video on Demand (VOD) services where a subscriber may select premium content, e.g., a recent movie or sports event, to be delivered for viewing. Upon selection of a VOD content, the content is supplied to customer premise equipment, e.g., a set top box at the subscriber's residence, and the subscriber is billed for the ordered content.
Existing VOD servers used by the cable industry today tend to support standardized protocols which can be used to control the delivery of ordered content. Examples of such protocols include the ISA protocol suite which is part of the Interactive Services Architecture that was developed for cable companies with the purpose of supporting VOD services. These particular protocols are generally referred to as ISA protocols and include a Lightweight Streaming Control Protocol (ISA LSCP), ISA Session Set Up protocol (ISA SSP) and various other ISA protocols. ISA protocols are described at www.interactiveservices.org. Time Warner Cable's Session Setup Protocol (SSP) Version 2.3 dated May 19, 2003 and Lightweight Stream Control Protocol (LSCP) Version 1.1 dated Sep. 5, 2003 which are available at the www.interactiveservices.org website are both hereby expressly incorporated by reference. Additional information on ISA Lightweight service protocols is provided in: 1) the LSCP Implementation Specification Version 1.0 dated Apr. 12, 2004 (TWC-LSCPI-SP-1.0); 2) CableLabs Video-On-Demand Content Specification 1.1 (MD-SP-VOD-CONTENT1.1-I03-040107 dated Jan. 7, 2004 and 3) CableLabs Asset Distribution Interface Specification Version 1.1 (MD-SP-ADI1.1-I03-040107 dated Jan. 7, 2004 each of which is hereby expressly incorporated by reference. A derivative system which uses ISA commands to implement VOD functionality which is also used by many cable companies is the OpenStream system described at www.tandbertv.com which is an on-demand digital service platform and related protocols that allow cable operators to provide on-demand video services. These cable industry standards are used to provide the backend management functions and interface/APIs for many VOD systems currently in use by the cable industry today. Backend management functions may include such things as, session set up, controlling delivery authorization for users, network personal video record (NPVR) functions, and billing functions. Control of delivery may include supporting one or more NPVR features, in response commands received from a customer premise equipment (CPE) device.
Recent advances in broadband network used to deliver IP packet streams and IP devices, such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc. have opened up new opportunities for the delivery of content, e.g., video on-demand. IP devices often rely on Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) signaling to control on-demand streaming. RTSP is a client-server multimedia presentation control protocol, designed to address the need for efficient delivery of streamed multimedia over IP networks. RTSP is described in the Internet Society's Network Working Group Request for Comments (RFC) 2326 dated 1998 which is hereby expressly incorporated by reference.
As potential customers are exposed to one or more choices of content providers, and content delivery becomes more reliable, a provider's ability to distinguish itself from other content sources becomes ever more important from a business and profitability perspective. One way to distinguish over other content providers is to provide access to a large content selection. This provides not only the opportunity for increased sales due to the large number of items available but also increases the chances that a subscriber will be satisfied with the service, including available content, and remain loyal to the content provider's service.
Historically, VOD tended to be implemented with a limited selection of titles, e.g., the top 100 titles being available at any given time. Traditionally, the 100 titles might represent 800 hours of video which would have to be stored and accessible in response to subscriber requests. As the format of the content changed to higher resolution formats such as S Video and more recently to HD, the amount of data storage capacity required to store the video data has increased considerably. For example, to store the content in HD format requires approximately 4 times the amount of data storage capacity than was required for standard definition television. While the cost of data storage has decreased considerably with recent improvements in digital data storage devices, the storage requirements for maintaining a large content library remain significant. As customers expect more content choices and/or formats to be supported, the data storage requirements for a VOD service are expected to continue to increase.
Many large systems are implemented through the use of regional servers where local customers can access and request content available on the regional server used to service the customer, e.g., the regional server closest to the customer, but not other regional servers. In such a system, each of the regional servers will normally include some content which is common to all the regional servers, e.g., the latest movie releases, and some local content, e.g., recent local news shows, which may be available only from the regional server corresponding the area to which the local regional news show corresponds. The potential return for including the same set of local content on all the regional servers may not be justified given that there may be very little interest or demand for a regional east coast news show on the west coast for example. Similarly, the cost of storing a very large number of titles at all regional servers for long periods of time in a system may not be justifiable given the data storage costs.
Thus, it should be appreciated that continuously adding storage to every video server at every location in a system fails to become cost justified particularly with regard to content that may be requested relatively infrequently. The data storage upgrades can be expensive and there is an impact to the divisions/regions that perform the update in the terms of potential systems errors whenever the system hardware is updated/changed.
While content is one key to success in implementing an on-demand content service, just adding additional titles to a content store of a system is not guaranteed to directly translate into increased system use, e.g., content sales. For additional content to add value, it is important that the potential customers be able to easily find and order the content the user finds interesting in and easy manner.
As the available content increases, it places ever greater constraints on the user interfaces via which subscribers order content. Typical user interfaces for VOD systems are TV based navigational interfaces with the user navigating through menus and entering limited amounts of text using a TV, set top box, or other type of remote control. In addition to input constraints corresponding to the use of a remote control as the primary input device, TV based user interfaces are further limited by the problem of relatively low television resolution. The low resolution results in limitations on menu presentation. Further limitations may be the result of other constraints corresponding to limitations corresponding to previously deployed equipment which may be limited by hardware or communications protocol constraints particularly in the case of set top box based systems where it may not be practical to replace a large amount of previously deployed equipment.
Accordingly, increasing the amount of content available via a content delivery system, e.g., a system including VOD capability, has two major impacts, i.e., a client user interface impact and a content storage impact.
From the above discussion it should be appreciated that regardless of the protocol or type of network connection used to deliver content, e.g., video, on demand, several problems exist when trying to provide users access to a large amount of content particularly when the users of the service are geographically dispersed, e.g., located in different regions throughout the country.
Thus, there are at least two aspects of a content delivery system where there is a need for improvement. The first area is data storage requirements, e.g., the amount of data storage needed to support a wide number of VOD titles. The second area where there is a need for improvement is the user interface, e.g., the portion of system interface through which a user may identify available titles and/or order content.